Dynamic Network Reconfiguration for Mitigating Price Integrity Attacks in Grid-Aware Price-Based Demand Response

The potential vulnerability of demand response (DR) to cyber-attacks represents a significant challenge that can have detrimental impacts on the technical and economic performances of the distribution system (DS). This issue is addressed in the proposed grid-aware price-based DR framework under price integrity attack (PIA) as a bi-level defender-attacker problem. The bi-level comprises a distribution system operator (DSO) at the upper-level, and demand response providers (DRPs) and customers at the lower-levels. It uses a grid-aware, distribution locational marginal price as an interaction in DR pricing. The defender-attacker problem is constructed when the attacker devises an adversarial DR attack on the DRP’s price using PIA to manipulate the load consumption of the customers. In response, the DSO uses dynamic Network Reconfiguration (NRE) as a defender action to change the grid-aware price for mitigating adverse DR. The proposed problem is tested on the 33-bus and 119-bus DS and is solved using the nested reformulation & decomposition method. Numerical analyses demonstrate that the proposed methodology effectively shows the substantial change in economic and technical performance of DR under attack and defender action. It shows the significant impact of PIA which reduces DR contribution from 9.60 to 2.15 %, and then improves to 5.30 % with the defender action using dynamic NRE for 33-bus. For the 119 bus, it changes from 9.90 % to 3.73 % then to 7.49 %. Further, the proposed model shows its scalability and tractability on small- to large-scale systems effectively.